When it comes to comedy, my favorite is the kind where chaos is happening in the background, while at the forefront a straight man is seemingly unaware. This is why the “Naked Gun” trilogy is brilliant and also why nothing makes me pee harder than the scene in “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” when Steve Martin is [...]

Non-Fiction Chelsea Handler, humor, julie klausner, Memoir

One of the trickiest jobs in the world would be writing the summary of Nick Flynn’s memoir The Ticking is the Bomb for the dust jacket. It is billed as being about Flynn’s thoughts on torture after the revelation of photos from Abu Ghraib, juxtaposed with sonogram photos of his daughter.
In true memoir fashion, it [...]

Non-Fiction Memoir, Nick Flynn

In college I had a poetry writing professor who was famous by her own right, but the sister of a far more famous writer. Our assignment was to find a collection of poetry, read it, learn a bit about the writer, analyze the work, and then present our findings. I hopped down the street to [...]

Poetry billy collins

In The Good Thief, Hannah Tinti has created the equivalent of a carnival moon walk for adults. It is an adventure story, complete with an orphan and everything: Ren is a one-handed klepto who has recently been sprung from a priest-run home for boys slash winery by a man named Benjamin claiming to be his [...]

Novel Hannah Tinti

If you can suspend your belief long enough to buy that Chicago’s fourth-largest newspaper would send its cub reporter to a small town eleven hours away to cover the grisly murders of two girls, than the rest of Gillian Flynn’s novel Sharp Objects is really easy.
Camille is a stoic toughie with a soft, forgiving touch [...]

Novel Gillian Flynn

As I just clicked on Goodreads’ four-star rating for Ha Jin’s A Free Life,  I couldn’t help but wonder about the countless number of stars I would have awarded it if something had actually happened in the book. I mean, I already “really liked it” in the book review website’s parlance. With a little drama [...]

Novel ha jin

DISCLAIMER: I’m not much on short stories, and I’ll admit that I’m using a generalization here, but so many of them are too something. Like contrived edginess for the sake of being edgy. Like a tribal tattoo on the small of your back, but you don’t know what the symbol means. And other times they [...]

Short Stories Amy Bloom

One of the best things about reading A Dead Hand: A Crime in Calcutta, is diving face-first into sixty-something writer Paul Theroux’s scenes of epic tantric massages, then flipping to the author’s bio on the dust jacket and giggling about how that man wrote these scenes.
For one thing, Theroux looks like a hybrid of Mr. [...]

Novel paul theroux

The character John Coetzee, as written about in a fictionish-like sorta memoir, is socially awkward, not a real man, does not emit any sort of sexual vibe, and was never a great writer embraced by the collective.
Summertime by JM Coetzee is delivered as a novel with an alternative story format. Vincent, an English biographer, is [...]

Novel JM Coetzee

In The Unnamed, Joshua Ferris invents a disease that can’t be defined as physical or psychological. It’s a something-or-other that sends Tim Farnsworth walking at inopportune moments. Something grabs a hold of his body, and he just goes without slowing for anything that gets in his path until finally, exhausted, he stops behind a [...]

Novel Joshua Ferris